Black and grey realism tattoo of a Roman numeral clock face within ornate scrollwork, with a small heart and a row of beads, covering the upper arm and shoulder.

Clock and scrollwork on upper arm and shoulder

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large black and grey tattoo covers the upper arm and part of the shoulder. A Roman numeral clock face sits at the centre, surrounded by ornate scrolling swirls, a small heart motif and a row of dotted beads running down the arm. The shading is smooth and soft, with highlights and a dark background that give the clock and scrolls depth, and the photograph is taken from the side against a plain grey backdrop.

Realism Upper arm Shoulder Clock Roman numeral Scrollwork Heart Bead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit still and mind the draught off the platform, because I'll tell this once and not again. The clock over the booking hall at Carrowby Junction ran eleven minutes slow for forty years, and every porter knew it, and nobody dared touch the hands. The man who first set them was Abel Ferrier, a clockmaker's son with more pride than sense, and he set them the morning his daughter Nell caught the 7.40 to Lowestoft with a tin box of pearls her mother had left her.

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He carved the iron scrolls round the dial himself, curling like sea spray off a breakwater, and in the middle of them he worked a small heart, because he swore the clock would keep true time for whoever was still waiting on the far end of the line. Nell never came back on the 7.40. Abel grew old under that dial, and the eleven minutes stayed where he'd left them, like a man holding a door open.

Every Sunday after that, a string of black jet beads came down the platform in a handkerchief, and the porters swept them up and counted them, because it was said one bead fell for every year she'd been gone. By the time the count reached thirty, the porters had stopped sweeping and started waiting. Then one grey winter morning a woman in a grey coat stepped off the 7.40, looked straight up at the dial, and said, quite plainly, that the clock was wrong.

It was. Somebody reached up with a ladder that very afternoon and moved the hands to the true hour, and Abel's clock has kept honest time ever since. Mind your ticket now, and when you hear the bell go late, don't blame the clock. It's only keeping faith with the ones who haven't got off the train yet.